The year is 1990 Jerry Sternin and his wife Monique and their
little 10 year old son, Sam have just landed at Hanoi Airport. The
Sternins have been sent by the Save the Children organization at the
behest of the Vietnam Government to help with a huge issue of child
malnutrition. After the first night stay at the government guest house
the next morning the couple go to meet the Foreign Affairs Minister.
The minister tells them, “Listen we do have a huge problem but not all
my colleagues are very happy to have an American here. So you have
just six months to not only find the issue but also reverse the problem
and make it a sustainable solution.” Jerry knew that conventional wisdom would say that the problem with malnourishment was because of an intertwined issue of three
things which are poor sanitation, no clean drinking water, and poverty.
Now with just one couple and a few staff there was no way he would
be able to save these people from either poverty or change the entire
sanitation system or even bring in clean water. Jerry Sternin interestingly had said in an interview was that these are TBUs or True But
Useless information. They decided to hit the ground so they visited
four villages or in Vietnam called communes where they decided to
weigh every child below the age of three. They weighed 2,000 of them
and they found that over 68% of them were actually malnourished
and half of them under the huge risk of dying.
When the list was prepared, he asked the staff to see whether there
was any child in that list who was not malnourished, who was healthy
but belonged to a very poor family. People looked at that list and they
found some, and it was true for all villages. So, Jerry and his wife
decided to visit these families which were poor but had healthy children. Initially of course the families were shy about saying what they do differently but finally they
opened up. Jerry and his wife found out that they did three things differently – one, is that while like others they were feeding the rice soup to their children because that’s the only
thing everyone there could afford, they were feeding it four times a day instead
of twice like the other families. Second, the mothers were going into the rice
paddy fields and scrimping around for little shrimps and little crabs and foraging
in the forest for sweet potato leaves and they were putting that in the broth
and boiling it. Third, instead of allowing other people or the children to serve
themselves, the mothers in these houses actually serve the children themselves by
ladling to the bottom of the pot so that they could get those shrimps and crabs.
These were the three differences. Jerry and his wife realised that this is replicable.
It was what Jerry called bright spots. Initially, of course the organizers they said, “Let’s
take a loudspeaker and tell everyone”, but Jerry knew this is not
going to work, so he decided to hold workshops that would be run by
the poor mothers with healthy children for the other mothers with
unhealthy children. They would cook once every day and everyone together with their children would have a meal. There was a catch here,
the mothers that would come to attend would have to go to the rice
paddies, scrounge around and forage for little shrimps and crabs and
go to the forests and get some sweet potato leaves and come with
that. That was the entry requirement for the workshop. Then they
cooked together and ate one extra meal. Within twelve days there was
a perceptible change in all those children and they started slowly and
slowly growing healthier.
Within three months 40% of the children were moved from the
malnourished list to the nourished list. Slowly the team decided to
expand this to other villages and again Jerry said no to replicate with
the shrimps and potato leaves. Rather he asked them to find out what
other healthy practices do poor families with healthy children have. In
some villages it was peanuts or dried fish and that was then replicated. What they were really trying to do was to find pockets of brilliance
or bright spots within the environment, like within the organization,
and bring it to everywhere else. This was extremely successful! It was
rolled out across Vietnam and over a million children over the next
few years benefited. Post that across 40 countries have adapted this
process of looking at intractable problems.
What a revolutionising story!
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